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South Asia Investor Review is focused on reporting, analyzing and discussing the economy and the financial markets of countries in South Asia, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. For investors looking to invest in emerging markets beyond BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), this blog is designed to help international investors looking to learn about investing in South Asia with focus on Pakistan. Riaz has another blog called Haq's Musings at http://www.riazhaq.com

Sri Lanka's per capita income has quintupled over the last two decades from about $700 to $3500, significantly outperforming all other South Asian economies. During the same period, Pakistan's per capita GDP has increased from $500 to $1300 while India's is up from $400 to $1400.

In addition to its high per capita GDP for the South Asia region, Sri Lanka has also excelled on Human Development Index (HDI), a key indicator of social development assessed each year by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Sri Lanka has the fastest growing economy with the highest social indicators in South Asia region. Its economy grew at 7.2% last year and it is expected to post 8% growth this year. With a literacy rate of 91% and life expectancy of 76 years, the UNDP ranks it among countries with high human development. It has achieved this progress in spite of a 26-year-long violent insurgency by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) which it successfully ended in 2009.

By contrast, both India and Pakistan continue to lag Sri Lanka in terms of both economic and social indicators. India's economy has slowed in recent years. India's per capita GDP has shrunk in US dollar terms this year, significantly reducing the gap with Pakistan whose GDP has also seen slow growth since 2008. India suffers from low levels of human development with a rank of 136 among 187 countries. Pakistan ranks even lower at 146.

Pakistan's per capita GDP remained essentially flat in 1990s before doubling in years 2000-2008 on Musharraf's watch when Pakistan joined the ranks of middle income countries with per capita income of $1000 or more. Pakistanis have seen a very modest growth in their incomes since 2008.

While India's human development is still low, it has continued to make steady progress in the last two decades. Pakistan's human development progress briefly accelerated in years 2000-2007 on President Musharraf's watch. Pakistan's HDI grew an average rate of 2.7% per year under President Musharraf from 2000 to 2007, and then its pace slowed to 0.7% per year in 2008 to 2012 under elected politicians, according to the 2013 Human Development Report titled “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World”. Going further back to the decade of 1990s when the civilian leadership of the country alternated between PML (N) and PPP, the increase in Pakistan's HDI was 9.3% from 1990 to 2000, less than half of the HDI gain of 18.9% on Musharraf's watch from 2000 to 2007.

There is much Pakistan can learn from Sri Lanka's record on human and economic development as well as fighting violent insurgencies. It is especially important today as its economy and education suffer in the midst of a growing Taliban violence that threatens the very existence of Pakistan.

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Has the Indian economy shrunk over the last one year? A PTI press release states that India's economy is expected to grow to $1.7 trillion by the end of the financial year 2013-2014. But how much was the Indian economy's size previous year? In dollar terms was it less or higher than $1.7 trillion? Interestingly as per an IMF report, name World Economy Outlook published in April 2013, the Indian GDP for the financial year 2012 was $1.8 trillion and was expected to be $1.9 trillion for the financial year ended 2013-2014. Therefore from that perspective the Indian economy has not risen to $ 1.7 trillion but has actually shrunk in dollar terms from $1.8 trillion to $1.7 trillion at a time when it should have been ideally been $1.9 trillion. In terms of rupees, surely the value of the Indian economy has grown up to Rs 105.39 Lakh Crore from Rs 93.88 Lakh Crore in 2012-2013 (Read here).

Yet the shrinking in the dollar term is primarily because of major devaluation of the rupee over the last one year. From around the level of below 55, the rupee had a major fall to 68 to a dollar before having a substantial recovery to around 62 now. The considerable depreciation, which was predominantly because of a massive surge in Current Account Deficit (CAD), has to a certain extent arrested but other major concerns, which too have been responsible for the falling trust in rupee, do remain. Therefore apparently even though in rupee terms the Indian economy has gone up, it has not benefitted the economy and on the contrary, a falling value of rupee increases the cost of imports thereby increasing the cost of literally everything, which has a substantial import component, even when that product is manufactured in India. Such increase in costs, including that of the import bills of fuel and gold in addition to a host of other things, eventually result in inflation. While a certain proportion of the CAD was also due to incredibly high level of gold import, one cannot deny that policy paralysis, policy indecisiveness, lack of institutional clarity, issues of corruption, massive delays in clearance of projects and tax feud, each of these did play a role in making India's growth story a sad saga where even increase in the GDP in terms of rupee does not end up in helping the nation at large. Meanwhile efforts to contain inflation have always been with respect to tampering with the interest rate with the presumption that higher interest rate would induce more deposit and reduce expenditure thereby controlling inflation. For the last few years it has been proved that India's primary inflation is because of food prices and not because of organised industry. Therefore unless reforms are brought in the agriculture sector, India's issues of stubborn inflation will not go away. The supply side constraints created by inefficiencies in the supply chain of agricultural products with middlemen making huge profit at the cost of both the producer of agricultural products and end consumers, is hurting the economy a lot. In addition to this, the investment climate has to be improved with a clear cut policy directive. One has to give some credit to the Finance Ministry and RBI for containing the CAD and bringing it down to manageable levels, yet the problems of India will not be solved by that alone. If policy directives are one thing that is needed to be worked upon, the other key issue invariably is that of subsidy. India's gargantuan subsidies and populist policies, be it highly subsidized fuel oils, be it subsidy in fertilisers or be it the food security bill or employment guarantee scheme, each of these revenue expenditures essentially has become a drag on the economy with no sustainable asset development to compliment the money being spent.

New York: Investment banks from UBS AG to Morgan Stanley spent half a decade building their operations in India, betting that a growing economy would trigger a boom in mergers and stock sales. They’ve spent the last three years reversing that expansion.The number of investment-banking positions in India has dropped by about 30% since 2010—more than double the pace of global industry cutbacks in the same period—according to the Indian unit of recruiter Randstad Holding NV. Some firms, including Bank of America Corp., have made even steeper cuts.The reductions reflect the falloff in deals and equity offerings involving Indian companies, down about 50% by value from 2010, as the country’s $1.8 trillion economy slows and corporate debt rises. “Some banks have resorted to lowering fees as they chase work, further denting revenues. More job cuts may come as big mergers and stock offerings remain subdued,” people familiar with the matter said.“It is a bloodbath at investment banks focusing on deals above $100 million,” said Vikram Utamsingh, a Mumbai-based managing director at consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal Inc. “It’s extremely difficult at this point in time to get hired as an investment banker in India. I don’t know how any bank will grow in this market.”BofA reductionsBank of America’s local unit, the second-ranked takeover adviser in India last year, has cut almost half of an investment-banking team that numbered 40 in 2010, said a person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified as the details are confidential. UBS has reduced investment-banking headcount to 10 from 16 during the same period, while Morgan Stanley’s local staff has fallen to about 22 from 35, people familiar with the banks’ operations said.Spokesmen for the three banks declined to comment.“Not all foreign firms are retrenching. Moelis and Co., the investment bank founded by Ken Moelis, entered India in 2012 and now has nine bankers there,” said Manisha Girotra, CEO of the New York-based firm’s local unit. Girotra said she plans to add staff in India, calling it a long-term strategic market for Moelis.“Some foreign banks have responded to India’s challenges by cutting senior positions there in favour of flying in bankers from offices like Hong Kong and Singapore when needed,” according to executives who spoke on condition of anonymity....

KARACHI (AFP) - Pakistan recorded five per cent growth in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, the central bank said on Friday, beating its target and almost doubling the figure for the same period last year.

The State Bank of Pakistan's data for the early months of the financial year began in July 2013, said GDP grew by 5.0 per cent, compared with only 2.9 per cent in the first quarter of the last fiscal year.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan, plagued by a bloody, destabilising Islamist insurgency and chronic power shortages, has struggled to energise its economy in recent years.

Growth has bumped along well below the level experts say is needed to absorb new entrants to the workforce from Pakistan's growing, youthful population.

India's economic growth rate slowed down in the most recent quarter, according to official figures.

The economy expanded at an annual rate of 4.7% in the three months to December, down from 4.8% in the previous quarter.

The figure was lower than analysts had been expecting.

Asia's third-largest economy has been weighed down by various factors, such as high inflation, a weak currency and a drop in foreign investment.

For the same period in 2012, annual GDP growth was 4.5%.

This is the fifth quarter in a row that India's annual growth rate has been below the 5% mark.

Manufacturing was hardest hit - falling by 1.9% compared with the previous year. The industry is considered one of the country's biggest job creators.

However, hotels, transport utilities and agriculture all showed substantial growth.

"We continue to expect India's economic recovery to remain slow and uneven. Local conditions remain challenging, which is critical as the economy is driven primarily by domestic demand," said Capital Economics economist Miguel Chanco.

Two years ago, India's growth rate stood at about 8%. Economists say the country needs to grow by that much in order to generate enough jobs for the 13 million people entering the workforce each year.

The BBC's Yogita Limaye in Mumbai says the numbers are not good news for the ruling Congress Party, which faces elections in May.

"These figures show that the slowdown really cemented itself in 2013. All four quarters showed growth below 5%," she said.

"One silver lining [for the government] is inflation. Prices had risen steeply in the beginning of the year but over the past two months they have come down."

More than half of the country's 1.2 billion people are under 25. Chand Pandey is one of them. He lost his job at a car parts firm recently and is struggling to find another one.

"Whichever company I go to, they say there's a slowdown and there's less production," he said.

"So they're not hiring any workers right now. It's been two or three months that I've been looking for a job, but I get the same answer everywhere."

As the State Bank of Pakistan remains tightlipped over the source and purpose of funding, Pakistan received another tranche of $750 million in the newly-established Pakistan Development Fund (PDF), taking the total contribution to $1.5 billion so far.Highly-placed sources told The Express Tribune that friendly countries have injected another sum of $750 million in the PDF – an account opened to channel money from abroad. The last tranche was received in February that stabilised the dwindling official foreign currency reserves.It is the first time that any country has generously given $1.5-billion assistance to Pakistan within one month, as Islamabad never received such an amount as ‘upfront’ payments. The US, which remains the largest contributor, always gave amounts in tranches spreading over several years. Under its five-year, $7.5-billion Kerry Lugar aid package, Washington gave less than $2.5 billion in government-to-government assistance in over three years.However, it was not clear whether the money received is a grant or depositary loans aimed at temporarily bailing out the country.The officials, seeking anonymity, confirmed the receipts but none of the concerned government agencies came on the record.SBP chief spokesman Umar Siddiqui did not respond to queries regarding receipt of the $750-million second tranche.However, a statement issued by the Ministry of Finance, quoting Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, said, “The government of Pakistan has implemented concrete steps to improve the overall external position by ensuring substantial capital and financial inflows in the country.“As a result, reserves have improved substantially in the last one month. This has been made possible by not only receiving larger inflows from multilateral and bilateral resources; but also through attracting forex flows through the capital markets and better home remittances.“The forex reserves of the country have improved from $7.59 billion on February 7, to $ 9.37 billion on March 7. The efforts of the government have started to show positive results and are on track to deliver what we had announced earlier that our forex reserves will reach around $10 billion by the end of March.”Dar’s statement also came on back of the rupee strengthening to Rs101 against the US dollar in the open market. However, the finance minister’s earlier claim, which he made last year that the dollar would be brought down to Rs98, stillremains elusive....

In his first comments after losing power in early January, Sri Lanka’s former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, has pinned the blame on India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), for the situation in his country as well as in Pakistan. Rajapaksa was speaking to a journalist from the Pakistani daily, Dawn.

When the reporter told him that many Sri Lankans had mentioned how Pakistan helped in quelling the Tamil insurgency, and asked how this was the case, Rajapaksa said, “See the US, Europe, the west, they are not our friends. Pakistan helped us, especially Musharraf. What happened in my country and the insurgency in your country, RAW is behind it.”

Rajapaksa’s charge comes in the wake of a Reuters report in mid January, which said that a RAW official had been asked by the then Rajapaksa government to leave the country before the polls. This was in response to the perception of the old government that RAW had helped cobble up the opposition alliance, which eventually ousted Rajapaksa. The Ministry of External Affairs had rubbished the report, and said no movement of diplomatic personnel had taken place from the Indian embassy in Colombo before their scheduled tenure was over.

MEA did not respond to Rajapaksa’s charge immediately. But a serving intelligence official, speaking to HT, said, “Did we spawn terror in Pakistan? Did we alienate Tamils and Muslims and the Sinhalese opposition? It is easy to blame external actors when you are responsible for the internal mess.” He called it ‘cheap nationalist stunts’.

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San Francisco based Cloudcade has announced it will invest $6 million to set up a game development studio in Lahore, Pakistan, according to Venturebeat.

The Lahore studio will be led by Ammar Zaeem, cofounder of Pakistan’s mobile game studio Caramel Tech which already has a team of 50 engineers.
The move is a big investment into Pakistan as a tech hub, and it shows how the game business is expanding around the globe.

Cloudcade:

Founded by Di Huang in 2013, Cloudcade is known for its popular multiplayer game "Shop Heroes" that pits players against each other in a competition to create the best shop they can. If a player can make a better store and perform more tasks than his or her rivals, he or she wins.

The game is available on the Apple iOS App Store, Google Play, Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon, Kongregate, and Facebook. It is now also supported on the Apple Watch.

43.5% of Indians, the highest percentage in the world, say they do not want to have a neighbor of a different race, according to a Washington Post report based on World's Values Survey.

About Pakistan, the report says that "although the country has a number of factors that coincide with racial intolerance – sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant region of the world, low economic and human development indices – only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbor of a different race. This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch".

Housing Discrimination:

It appears that there is a small but militant minority in Pakistan that is highly intolerant, but the vast majority of people are tolerant. My own experience as a former Karachi-ite is that there is little or no race or religion based housing segregation, the kind that is rampant in India where Muslims are not welcome in most Hindu-dominated neigh…

The development of JF-17, a modern highly capable and relatively inexpensive fighter jet, is the crowning achievement to-date of the Pakistan-China defense production cooperation. It's being deployed by Pakistan Air Force with Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC). The latest version is capable of launching a variety of nuclear and conventional weapons ranging from smart bombs and air-launched cruise missile Raad to anti-ship missiles.

I am the Founder and President of PakAlumni Worldwide, a global social network for Pakistanis, South Asians and their friends. I also served as Chairman of the NEDians Convention 2007. In addition to being a South Asia watcher, an investor, business consultant and avid follower of the world financial markets, I have more than 25 years experience in the hi-tech industry. I have been on the faculties of Rutgers University and NED Engineering University and cofounded two high-tech startups, Cautella, Inc. and DynArray Corp and managed multi-million dollar P&Ls. I am a pioneer of the PC and mobile businesses and I have held senior management positions in hardware and software development of Intel’s microprocessor product line from 8086 to Pentium processors. My experience includes senior roles in marketing, engineering and business management. I was recognized as “Person of the Year” by PC Magazine for my contribution to 80386 program. I have an MS degree in Electrical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
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